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The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
Paul Auster
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Paul Auster
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 3
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Paul Benjamin
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More quotes by Paul Auster
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Paul Auster
He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.
Paul Auster
Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.
Paul Auster
I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Paul Auster
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Paul Auster
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
Paul Auster
Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
Paul Auster
It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
Paul Auster
The ideal reader's the same, and I suppose this person has never had a face or a gender or an age. It's just some kind of unknown other who will be sympathetic and read each word carefully and understand what I'm writing about. I suppose every writer feels this.
Paul Auster
Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
Paul Auster
I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.
Paul Auster
Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.
Paul Auster
Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
Paul Auster
What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.
Paul Auster
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out
Paul Auster
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
Paul Auster
I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone.
Paul Auster
I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.
Paul Auster
We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
Paul Auster
Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.
Paul Auster
